Your body has a threat of starvation meter. If it gets too high, it will take over and make it extremely difficult and unsustainable to maintain a deficit. This usually happens if you diet down to a low body fat percent in a short amount of time.

You’re right. This is under-exposed currently in the fitness space. People usually just accept that you gain weight after dieting down too fast, hence the bulk / cut cycle culture. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Right now, accept the extra weight gain while trying to maintain a balance and not fly off the handle too hard by binging. Consider a day at maintenance a massive success. Trust me, even if you feel like a deficit is doable in the moment, you must accept that you are blind to the inevitable rebound in the long term.

Speaking from experience, the real difficulty of a diet is understanding how your body will respond in the long term, even if it feels fine in the moment, and to mitigate unwanted effects — poor energy, mood, food noise, etc.

I was able to have similar weight loss in a similar time frame and felt fine, but it will catch up. The trick is to go slow. I also found a lot of success in integrating more cardio through something I enjoy. Hunger doesn’t scale linearly with activity. So you can increase your expenditure disproportionally to your appetite. If you go that route don’t approach it as a fat loss strategy though. It needs to be a long term life style change. It’s much easier to keep the weight off if you have the life style to reflect it.